Vidyo Raises Another $17.1 Million for Video Conferencing Push

The company, which has raised $116 million since its founding in 2005, wants to expand the reach of its software-based video conferencing technology.

Vidyo, which has challenged larger established video conferencing vendors such as Cisco Systems and Polycom with software-based solutions, has raised another $17.1 million in funding that officials said will be used to fuel more sales and expand the company's reach worldwide.
The new funding, which includes money from previous investors as well as new ones—including Triangle Peak Partners—brings the amount to $116 million that Vidyo has raised since it was founded in 2005, and comes a month after company executives announced that it grew billings last year by 68 percent.
Vidyo announced the $17.1 million funding April 22. The company is seeing a "hockey stick effect in the adoption" of the personal video conferencing market, which is helping Vidyo grow, according to co-founder and CEO Ofer Shapiro.
"Our customers are expanding their deployments with us at an amazing rate of 18 percent per quarter on an average dollar basis," Shapiro said in a statement. "We will use these funds to support this growth and accelerate new customer wins."

Vidyo entered the video conferencing space at a time when the market was dominated by hardware endpoints from Cisco, Polycom and others that enterprises would have to buy and operate in conference rooms. However, the rise of such trends as cloud computing, virtualization, mobility and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) has driven the demand for software-based solutions that can run on a variety of endpoints—from telepresence systems and notebooks to tablets and smartphones—and can be used by any user at any time and from any location.

Vidyo's VidyoConferencing platform includes such technologies as the VidyoRouter for high-definition multipoint, VidyPanorama for personalized telepresence experiences and VidyoPortal, a Web-based environment for managing, configuring and scaling the VidyoConferencing system from any endpoint. Vidyo officials last month released virtual editions of VidyoGateway and VidyoPortal to help businesses more easily bring video conferencing capabilities into their increasingly virtualized and cloud-based data centers.
Cisco and Polycom over the last year also have adopted more software-centric approaches to video collaboration. Cisco last year stopped developing its Android-based Cius enterprise tablet, shifting its focus instead to software solutions like Jabber and WebEx. Polycom for the past couple of years has emphasized its efforts to adopt a more software-focused approach to collaboration. In October 2012, Polycom unveiled its RealPresence CloudAXIS suite, a cloud-based solution that was the foundation of a massive product rollout.
Polycom officials on April 16 said that after six months of trials and beta testing, they were making the CloudAXIS technology generally available.
Vidyo is seeing increasing adoption in the enterprise—the company's enterprise business grew 54 percent in 2012 over the previous year, according to company officials. They also said they are finding particularly good traction in such verticals as education and health care. In 2012, Vidyo saw its health care business grow 77 percent, and on April 18, the company announced a partnership with Internet2—a technology community founded by universities and colleges in the United States—to provide low-cost, subscription-based video communications capabilities to not only Internet2 member universities but also K-12 schools throughout the country.
"Vidyo's scalable, extremely accessible high-quality solution is priced at pennies per minute, enabling a whole new range of unique uses and applications that were never before available," Amnon Gavish, senior vice president of vertical solutions at Vidyo, said in a statement when the partnership was announced.